Not long after Epic announced OS X support for its Unreal Engine game middleware, the company has another announcement to make: Using the just-released Flash Player 11, UE3 is now coming to web browsers, further cementing the browser's position as the most important thing installed to your computer.

According to Epic's press release, the Unreal Engine will leverage the new Flash Player's Stage 3D APIs to enable browser games with graphics previously seen only on locally installed games. If it can pick up traction, I would expect it to eventually lead to Quake Live-esque browser games that look a bit less like PC games from a decade ago. This could also be great for game demos, which could now in theory be played in a window on the developer's website instead of downloaded to your hard drive.

This announcement should be welcomed for game developers already using Unreal Engine 3, since they'll be able to port their software to browsers without having to rebuild their games from the ground up. Expect to see prettier browser-based games as Flash 11 is more widely adopted.

Flash 11 now supports DirectX and OpenGL using the new Stage 3D API, so any game that uses either DX or OpenGL, which is literally every single major game and game engine, can now run inside Flash. So technically it's Flash that supports UE3 already, and Epic are simply making use of it.Reply

Not true, it just means that any game can now utilize Dx/OpenGL in Flash. Games still have to be completely rewritten in actionscript, meaning that flash does not support games, games support flash, and flash supports directx/opengl.Reply

Nope, games don't need to be rewritten in Flash. Adobe has a tool called Alchemy that converts C++ code into ActionScript byte code. This is how Epic Games converted the Unreal Engine 3. If they wrote any ActionScript for their port, it was very little, perhaps a loader or something to deal with assets, the rest was just C++.Reply

I didn't really necessarily mean they had to be rewritten by hand, just that the code had to be converted to a format that flash can handle. It still means that it's the game that supports flash, not flash that supports the game.Reply

Screw html5. Working with html and javascript is a nightmare vs a normal computing language (actionscript). Granted actionscript is pretty terrible in comparison to many other languages like C/C++, C#, java, it is WAY better than trying to use javascript.Reply